Self-employment and digitalization in Kazakhstan’s megacities as a factor of internal migration acceleration

Kazakhstan is experiencing intensive internal migration processes. They are caused by both push factors related to the shrinking role of agriculture and pull factors of better employment opportunities in urban areas. In Kazakhstan, the processes of internal migration, predominantly rural-urban migration, have significantly accelerated over the last few years. The main flow of migrants is directed to the country’s two megacities, where the number of self-employed has increased significantly during the same period, which was not observed before. This allowed to propose the hypothesis that the growing opportunities to work as self-employed individuals have become a new and major pull factor for migrants. In turn, the active development of self-employment can be linked to the digitalization of some service industries, which has created an additional demand for a workforce that migrants fill. To assess these assumptions, the article conducts a comparative and correlational analysis of net migration indicators, the number of self-employed people, the sectoral structure of the labor market, and the number of organizations selling goods and services online for two megacities in Kazakhstan, as well as several others. The analysis confirmed the hypothesis that digitalization processes influence labor market growth in sectors with a high proportion of self-employed people and, as a result, accelerate internal migration, primarily of the rural population to the country’s largest cities. The study of the direction of internal migration flows has also made it possible to qualify the processes of migrant movement from rural areas of Kazakhstan as megapolization rather than urbanization.